


Men Who Do Not Build

by obfuscatress



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M, abuse of innocent pottery, japanese arts and crafts, magic based telekinesis, magic user!Q, partial exploration of Q's backstory, protection spells, the laws of physics apply loosely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-17 10:25:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9319535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: The vase topples over with the uncanny certainty of a breathy ‘uh-oh’. There are things he isn't equipped to fix.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AmeresLare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmeresLare/gifts).



> My contribution to this year's 00Q Reverse Bang (third one in a row now too) is for [Zyn's](http://amereslare.tumblr.com/) stunning artwork below. They were kind enough to create more wonderful art for the story, which you'll find sprinkled throughout.
> 
> Special thanks to my two betas [potter-you-git](http://potter-you-git.tumblr.com/) and _A._

 

**(i)**

The vase topples over with the uncanny certainty of a breathy ‘uh-oh’. He is five and Mummy has told him not to run in the hall, but he’s late for dinner as it is and the rug just so happens to be creased in all the wrong places. Henry watches it spin on its axis once – like his first baby tooth spiraling dangerously around the silver ring of the sink drain – before it does what he pictures even before all other possibilities are entirely off the table; Mummy’s treasured red and white amphora is off the table and falling fast toward the floor.

It’s only supposed to last a second, but for Henry time slows dangerously as his brows furrow with the blow that is to come. Only, the dozens of cracks sounding within the porcelain seem to as they form, until, halfway through, Henry’s astonishment breaks the spell of the moment and the other half of the vase splinters all over at once.

“Henry!” His mother shouts two rooms over, her footsteps already haunting the creaks in the floorboards. “Oh. Dear me, what have you done?”

“I- I’m sorry,” he says, tears welling up behind the frames of his glasses.

Later, when she’s enquired about repairs (a lost cause) and turned the unharmed half into a ornate bowl, Mummy asks him how on earth he’s managed to shatter the vase so strangely. He doesn’t know, he tells her, and keeps quiet about what he thinks might be the case.

 

**(ii)**

They have unwritten rules about the correct placement of caffeinated beverages at work stations after the latest incident involving a triple espresso and R’s keyboard. They’re human, despite the inhuman feats they perform on a daily basis and that inevitably leads to the odd casualties: an ugly mug here and there, a sentimental one at two in the morning, a disastrous spill over some important hardware accompanied by profane outbursts from all immediate station members. Some have implemented mug holders in the least volatile spot of their desk. Q wishes he had the luxury of a non-volatile space.

“Careful, 007,” he says absentmindedly when the agent rests a hand on the edge of the table beside his fifth cup of Earl Grey for the day, “Your track record is bad enough without the demise of my favourite mug.”

Especially when he’s broken this one twice before already. One can, after all, only fit the pieces together some many times before there are too many fractures to keep it from leaking. The last had made it through four injuries and eventually met its end during a nighttime emergency at the hands of Ogabu, who swept the shards into the trash before Q came into the office the next morning. The replacement that appeared on his desk a week later didn’t feel quite right in his hands without the internal scars, but Q didn’t say a word about it.

Bond, insufferable as he insists on being, says, “Now, wouldn’t that truly be a loss for all of England?” His mouth quirks with amusement and Q wonders whether anyone has ever taught him how to smile. “A replacement would be easy enough to buy,” he adds to Q’s thoroughly unimpressed glare, “Unless, of course, you have a sentimental attachment to it.”

It’s his way of prying and Q rolls his eyes in response. “Buy me two if you must. What I would like to see is you replacing all the invaluable prototypes I send you out with only to never see them again. You know, it is rather tedious to have to construct new pieces for other agents so as to obtain some useful field data.”

 

He steals the mug away from Bond’s reach, which only results in the man invading his desk further. “You’re always so hard on me. I save England on a regular basis and occasionally half the planet on the side.”

“Yes, well, this is the British Secret Service. Get in line.” Q sips at his tea and just like that Bond is effectively dismissed from interrupting his work any further.

 

**(iii)**

All things that go up, must come down. Henry finds there isn’t a clause on how long the in between can last. There is, of course, gravity – a choked back scream in the split second it takes for Geoffrey Hurst to fall out of a tree, effectively doomed to stay in his room for the rest of the summer with a broken leg – but it isn’t always as fixed as his physics teacher likes to tell him. Lying in the shade of the sparse maidenhair tree in his backyard, he throws grapes into the air and lets them levitate at the apex of their trajectory for just a moment longer than they ought to.

He’s learned to do this over the years somehow, always reminded of the vase as he watched the grapes slow, stop, and speed up again one by one. If he focuses, holding them still when they slow naturally is easy, though he can’t guide them more than that for the life of him. At least not until he’s stranded in the garden oasis for the six weeks Geoffrey is stuck in a cast. Watching the purple blob hover uncertainly, he can almost make out the divide between flesh and skin, the boundary and the two sides pushing on it. He splits it slowly along a cut at the base, drawing an equator with his mind. It peels away with ease after that, and for the first time Henry is levitating three distinct parts of a single entity.

He discards the skin halves and eats the flesh, starts the process from scratch with the next fruit. It’s slow going, but he’s got time to spare, a whole four weeks, as a matter of fact. No one notices the multiplying slivers of fruit peel scattered on each side of the tree.

 

 

**(iv)**

He’s cultivated a precise patience in his lifetime and a notion of the exact composition of everything. He knows the grain of the ceramic in his mug and the twist of copper wire under smooth plastic. He knows every protocol for the disarmament of explosive devices, has come to learn the patterns of agents passing through, their chit chat and razor sharp remarks designed to draw blood. And still he manages to be surprised, on occasion, when the ley lines aren’t sitting right.

“Suppose I were to acquiesce to your… suggestion,” Q says and allows himself a moment to reorient. “How exactly do you expect this to play out?”

“One dinner hardly requires a quarter report.”

“One dinner with you costs most people their lives.” He is wasting his lunch break arguing technicalities for something he has already decided on anyway.

“Take out an insurance then.”

It’s Q’s turn to smile today; only one of them is ever allowed to, after all. “I can hardly imagine anything more pleasant than spending three hours listening to your _hilarious_ remarks,” he says, thoroughly bored.

“Should I be offended?”

“Should I make an effort to _offend_?”

He hasn’t spared Bond a glance since he asked Q out, pretending to deliberate, when he is simply caught up in peeling a tangerine. His nails are too short for this and he grafts the white veins loose by raking a scathing gaze along their winding paths. He wouldn’t typically have the patience for this, but he doesn’t typically have observers to his atypical meals either. He gets another stretch loose and says: “All right. I’ll go out with you once, but I pick the place and we go Saturday lunchtime. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Splendid. I’ll text you the details. Wear something that is allowed to crease.” He casts a pointed look at Bond’s pristinely pressed slacks. “We’ll be sitting on the floor. And no, I will not accept any complaints on behalf of your ageing knees. Now, if you will leave me to lunch in peace.”

Ever the well bred civil servant, Bond exits with a curt nod that Q can imagine would have been a fraction of a bow in another setting. For all the time he’s had Q’s ears ringing remotely from an ill-timed explosion, Bond shuts the door near inaudibly. Sometimes Bond can be so obnoxious, Q forgets he’s as much a spy as a complete trigger happy lunatic, that there are perfectly smooth attributes to him, gone unnoticed with all the serrated places that cut and chafe incessantly. It’s a shame he likes the man just that little bit more when he’s out breaking things. Q lets out a sigh and returns to his tangerine, pulling the web of strings loose from one pole to the other in a single move.

 

**(v)**

“I hope you wore nice socks,” Q tells Bond as he pushes his way through a door with a rather inconspicuous sign in hiragana .

“So they take your shoes as well as the integrity of any respectable suit?” Bond asks drily.

“Is it obvious yet that I set out to humiliate you?”

“Quite.”

Nevertheless, he complies wordlessly, bending down at the waist to arrange his polished oxfords next to Q’s sensible work shoes. Their shoes make as strange a pair as the two of them, but this is MI6: a collection of oddities, a variety of close range and long distance weapons, guns and ammunition and their makers all peas in a pod with trust issues to go around.

Q chooses to sit cross legged with his back to the door, leaving Bond to observe with the edges of his cuffs resting against the edge of the table. Small talk over the menu is an exercise in patience, but it’s a game they’re both amenable to, making their choices long before the waitress takes their orders. Bond insists on doing the whole thing in Japanese, speaking it, perhaps not haltingly, but with the rhythm of an acquired language, which in turn has Q choosing to stick to his carefully cultivated public school tones as opposed to the correctly intonated orders he’s practised in the cuisine’s native.

“You speak decent Japanese,” he says eventually when it’s just the two of them again, the pads of his thumbs skating along the ridges of the bamboo table mat.

“Decent? What high praise.”

“You could do better. What was your thoroughly arbitrary Oxford degree in again?”

“Should I concern myself with whether that’s a good guess or if you’ve simply been sloppy in carding through my file?”

“Oh please,” Q huffs, “I’d be your age by the time I’m done reading the shit you’ve accumulated over the years. It’s mostly in paper too, a pity to our dying forests, not to mention that it becomes increasingly dull after the first ten pages. It’s a shamefully early point to make it apparent you never learn from your mistakes and have an affinity for destruction.”

“It was oriental languages.”

Q’s eyebrow rises first in confusion, but smooths into a more elegant question once he catches up with the subject. “Is that still the appropriate term?” He certainly wouldn’t put it past the old establishments.

“I haven’t exactly been in the habit of mingling with distinguished alumni to check, so I wouldn’t know,” Bond says.

“You wouldn’t be allowed in the big boy club anyway, none of us are. Apart from the higher ups we aren’t exactly chosen for how well socialised we are.”

“How cynical of you, Q. Which establishment broke your spirit then?”

He is quiet for a long time, because nothing broke him, he broke them,  and that’s infinitely worse. “I studied at Cambridge.”

“And graduated top of the class two years early, of course, with having an attitude as your only grievance. Can’t put that on the certificate, unfortunately.”

“I never said I graduated.” He doesn’t mean for it to come out so quiet and Bond clucks, once, interest immediately piqued.

The matter of fact is, Q was expelled for poking around the wrong corners, which were the right corners as far as MI6 was concerned. And, when you’re twenty-one, – possibly facing criminal charges, certainly having to sit through an infuriatingly dull hearing – it is best not to be fussy when a lady in grey offers to resolve the issue sans handcuffs.

“You’ve been naughty.”

“Dear Lord, don’t ever say that to me again. Like I said, we’re not a well socialised lot.”

They’re quietly served while Q meditates on his past, the lapse in conversation on Bond’s end timed to perfection with the appearance of their waitress, and Q thinks he isn’t built for the old spy game. He’s in the frontlines of the new generation and Bond is one of the last soldiers standing on the old battlefronts.

It’s easy enough to forget when their ordinary lives are mutually strange and Bond says: “I do hope they cut you a good bargain.”

“Cambridge? Bloody dishonoured. The old mistress? You ought to know how it is: access to top tier national security and nothing honest to put on your resume, Mr Universal Exports.”

His head turns ever so slightly to one side, a gesture Q knows is Bond’s best attempt at a facial expression. They’re all like that, the double-ohs: blank faced with a purposeful twitch in their cheeks and deliberately cocked heads when he speaks to them. It used to unnerve him, the harshness of their cold eyes, and the fact that it does no longer ought to alarm him, but never quite does.

“All within reason,” Bond says cautiously.

“You know, I’ve always been rather surprised to find that I’ve caught up with you in the service even without the grooming. You had what… a fifteen year head start on me?”

“Funny what you can do when you stop swimming upstream.”

“Isn’t it just? Regardless, she did always like you best. I think it was the challenge. Some days you gave her migraines, but when you didn’t – and when the minister didn’t hear – she liked grinding her teeth over you.” Q watches the miscellaneous bits in his soup swirl past one another. “If you ever repeat this to anyone, I will vehemently deny it and see to it that some accident becomes you-”

“Confident are we?”

“Don’t interrupt, you cocky shit. You may remember my little invention called radio. Many more where that came from. Anyway, I don’t think she was wrong about you.”

That does leave him speechless, maybe. Bond isn’t one to do visibly stunned, and Q has to agree it’d be too much melodrama for him anyway. The drinking, the pills, the reckless masochistic streak Bond’s got running a mile wide somewhere deep in his bones, Q can take. The bandaging he’s willing to give a shot; the little hyperventilating pushes of breath that carry over the stray working comm as Bond scrubs dried blood out his scalp – sometimes his own, sometimes someone else’s, occasionally both – he’s perfectly happy to overlook without a word. The rest, the thin sections in his files before the months gaping wide open with grief, he stays well clear of.

“Thank you.”

They are just two words, distinct even in the way Bond murmurs them over the demolished half of a crisp tempura fried snow pea, gaze unwavering, and Q simply nods. He traces his fingers along the golden veins of the bowl in front of him thinking some damaged goods are best left untouched.

 

**(vi)**

The craft finds him by surprise one afternoon in a Google search over the shards of an antique bowl the cat knocked off the counter. Some things he cannot fix. Some things are skin and bone, woven together, too thin and too old and too intertwined for him to reform with ease. _’Kintsugi, Japanese art form_ ’ it reads and Q scrolls through three pages of pictures with his heart racing inappropriately over pottery.

Mother did always want him to have a proper hobby, he reminds himself on his way to the first class. It’s on the other side of town from his one bedroom MI6 cattle flat stuffed in a dinged up apartment block from the sixties. He’s twenty-two and continues to feel the consequences of his fall from grace, though he’s finding his footing again. Day job, one eared shelter cat, and some fuckwit up at HQ starving him for web access if he doesn’t behave.

Q – and he’s not Q yet, officially, but he isn’t Henry anymore either, and the new name isn’t worth learning – trudges faithfully through the rain in his parka (new, green) and a pair of too long slacks rolled up at the legs (old, black). He hangs his coat up on top of the others and unrolls his trouser legs to pool over his feet. When he finds a seat in the room on a cushion on the floor, he crosses his legs with his collared ankle pressed under the other, it’s blinking blue tracker signal swallowed up in the excess wool of his trousers.

“Welcome everyone,” the instructor says as Q lays out his shards, “Today we will start our journey toward mastering golden joinery.”

 

**(vii)**

Occasionally, Q has been prone to locking himself into his private work room in R&D to bide a slow Sunday night when he doesn’t have a film lined up on Netflix at home. It’s only the emergency weekends when he’s in anyhow, and it isn’t always obvious whether their operatives are going to live even when they’ve managed to successfully recover them: deeply hemorrhaged, or half drowned, or bleeding out of seven stab wounds and three more bandages.

He forces the tremor out of his hands and pulls the saddle chair up to his work bench, turns the overhead lights down low and the lamps on the desk up high to narrow his focus. There’s a knot of nausea twisting in on itself in his gut and his mind churns with the panic that’s caused it. The clutter on the tabletop vibrates on its own account, jingling as it all skitters back and forth on the hard surface.

“Stop,” he yells and suspends everything at once – LEDs, resistors, leftover clips of copper wire, the few screw lingering at the fringes of the mess from another project. He doesn’t have the patience for hardware right now, simply cannot juggle the components of a circuit when he’s all over the place. The entire nebula of his motherboard shrinks into a dense cluster and disappears in a plastic box on the old plywood desk jammed into the other corner of the room.

He stares at the glitter of them in there and feels his hands becoming restless again. Not for this though. The time for the things he itches to do has passed and this is the aftermath: a trembling craving for a cig and the unreasonable urge to sob soundlessly into his cat’s ribs. He doesn’t do either and makes tea instead.

The rumble of the kettle is soothing in its own way and Q sets up his laptop to show a live map of a helicopter sweeping over a patch of Mali desert, relieved the dot moves. Things weren’t supposed to go this way – two bullets and a cataclysm – but life has come for him from the strangest nooks since before he can remember. He just wasn’t aware there was a crevice in his heart right there.

And then the comm goes off with something that can only be a satellite phone call, dropping the lump lodged in his throat straight down into his stomach in the midst of pouring tea. The pot stills mid-air, frozen momentarily apart from the tea sloshing inside.

“Hello?”

“Q.”

“007?” Logically speaking, the microphone can’t pick up the hitch in his voice, but that doesn’t mean Bond won’t know it’s there. “You’re… conscious.”

“Barely. Sorry for disappearing earlier. Unforgivably rude.”

“You were shot.”

“You were worried, then.”

Q considers saying something to the effect of ’let’s not get too excited now’ or ’overestimation of self worth, as per usual’, but all that comes out is a soft: “Yes.”

The line stretches into a few moments of static and wheezing, Bond’s voice resurfacing like it’s dampened through an oxygen mask. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve got your gun.”

“Why would that- All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Is any of it molten?”

“No.”

“Irreparably chemically damaged?”

“No.” When Q doesn’t know what to say to that, Bond adds, “Fully operational, for your pleasure.”

Half of a broken laugh bubbles out of him before Q gets a hold of himself. “I think I prefer you in one piece and the guns gone.”

“Is that-”

“No,” Q hurries to say before Bond can even think to twist his words. It’s such a sudden action, he’s thrown out of the strange limbo of their conversation, remembering the pot of tea hovering by his face. He pours himself the rest of the cup, sets the pot down, and says, “Listen,  about this... _this_. Perhaps I would be amenable to dinner, if the offer still stands, and, of course, only once I’ve personally confirmed the miracle of the allegedly intact gun.”

“You’ll have to remind me about that when I’m not dying, but: Yes, the offer still stands.”

“Good.” Q fumbles for something more, his eyes falling to one of the books in the Old Languages lying open on a resurrection spell he once used on his secret pet gecko at Cambridge three weeks before he went rogue. How fortunate that Bond’s got that covered all on his own, the resurrection business, because Q never did pull off that spell successfully. “I’m glad you are all right,” he says before he can regret thinking it.

 

 

**(viii)**

Henry finds the books the way he finds himself: scavenging a forum in the confines of his teenage bedroom. He’s seventeen and too old to chalk his strange abilities up to childhood delusions, so he starts looking for answers. What he finds is a poorly crafted forum with an ongoing chat that’s lost as it progresses to the top of the screen. It sets off a tingle in his fingertips as he watches the bizarre transpire for months before he dares ask a question. _‘Am I insane?_ ’ morphs into _’How do I live with this?_ ’.

_Go to the library_ , someone tells him that same evening. He writes down the address on a post-it note and deletes his browsing history. The next morning, he labouriously retypes the URL and the sticky strip on his note turns black in the passing of a season.

It isn’t until two years later – at nineteen with a mop of overgrown hair – that he finally finds himself in Edinburgh in search of the bookshop they call “the Library’. He’d describe it more as cave of books, tiny and winding.

“Can I help you?” A woman asks him from what looks like a hole in the wall, but is actually the register.

Henry takes a step toward her, noting the collection of first edition children’s story books balanced on a bookshelf above the miniature counter. “Uh, I’m looking for Mnemosyne.”

It feels precarious to say out loud, everything from the forums kept contained for years, but the woman in front of him looks neither confused nor surprised. “You must be here to see the library then,” she says, “Haven’t been here before, have you? You’re quite a young lad.”

“No, this is my first time.”

“Aye, I better show you around then.”

The Library turns out to be two small bookcases in the living room corner upstairs, stuffed to the brim with leather bound volumes - some printed, some handwritten, and all of them well kept. Mnemosyne pulls two journals from the top shelf of one bookcase and an inch wide handbook from the other. “These should get you underway.”

“ _On the reversal of fragmentation_ , volume one,” Henry mutters, inspecting the cover of one of the older journals. It’s dated mid nineteenth century with the next volume following a decade later.

“There is, or used to be, a volume three. It might still be out on loan, but I haven’t had it here in the thirty-two years I’ve run the Library. The inventory was a nightmare to establish with the old book keeping. But I think you’ll find Carlyle’s work more useful anyway.”

“ _A Chronicle on the Reformative Arts_.”

“Yeah, that’s what he chose to call it; magic would’ve sounded crazy. Anything else?”

Henry is already shaking his head even as he is looking over all the books with foreign scripture on their backs. “Well, one thing. What are these?”

“Ah, those would be the old spells. Would you like one of them books too?”

“They’re not really my field.”

“They never are anybody’s. People just sorta pick ’em up as hobbies. Tell you, laddie, I’ll put one in for you and take your number down in case someone comes asking. How’s about that?”

Fourteen years later, he still owns the same burner phone he used on that first trip, now kept locked in his desk drawer beside the two dozen specialist books he’s amassed - the vast majority on the practical application of spells. He writes them into his firewalls and carves them into the pattern on the grips on his guns, has a good luck charm engraved on the back of his cat’s name tag. It isn’t his magic, strictly speaking, but in their circles no one squints too hard.

 

**(ix)**

“So, if the basis for a first date is sacrificing a bespoke suit and the second takes getting shot at – no, getting shot – am I going to survive number three?”

“Obviously not,” Q says without missing a beat. “I expect you to ask me out from the afterlife via an ouija board.”

They’re ambling, perhaps stalling as they rise up the few steps to Q’s building, and he’s starting to wonder how this is going to play out. He stands over Bond trapped on a lower step, and sniffs in the wind. “I still don’t understand you, Bond.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, so your hearing is failing you too now,” Q scoffs, though the annoyance slips from his face when Bond’s hand reaches out to encircle his wrist.

“Don’t deflect,” he murmurs and the look in his eyes has Q’s mouth go dry.

“You’re one to talk.”

“We’re not fifteen-”

“No, I’m thirty something and you’re a mummy.”

His half smiles are always the most charming.

“Fine. I can’t tell what it is you want from me. If I’m honest, I rather feel like a prototype damsel, since I am neither in distress nor, not that you’re particular in your sexual escapades, your type.”

Bond lets out a sound that comes close to a whistle, but misses the piercing pitch. “You may have overlooked a very important variable in this equation of yours,” he says and that flash of a predator appears in his eyes again. He keeps terrible company, Q thinks, when Bond leans forward fractionally in what is only the suggestion of a broader gesture to whisper: “Have you ever considered that perhaps I have a competence kink?”

It isn’t saucepan-eyes-worthy material, but Q can feel surprise pulsing through him hot, knows the glint that appears in his eyes – shining unmistakably – and hates himself for it. “Well, you know what they say: You always want what you don’t have.”

“Isn’t it ’what you can’t have’?”

“Who says there needs to be a distinction?”

“You wound me, Q,” Bond says without malice, but his fingers slip from Q’s wrist, and it makes something shift in Q.

He could leave now and they’d never have to speak of it again. Bond would let it slide, Q knows. There is something attentive, almost kind even in the intensity of the way he watches Q.

“Tuesday,” Q says and tilts Bond’s chin up with his index finger. His eyes briefly fall to Bond’s and he presses their lips together for an instant, plush while it lasts and then gone all at once. It’s not enough to make his heart race, but Q doesn’t miss the way Bond’s eyes chase his mouth for a moment too long.

He clears his throat and nods. “Tuesday.”

 

 

**(x)**

Reformation begins from the inside out. It’s a fact if Q has ever known one, and yet, confronted with the lump of molten metal Bond returned as a gun one time, Q is left contemplating  a unique type of destruction, every particle out of place and perfectly settled. It isn’t so different from the man he entrusted it to.

Q meditates on the collapsed end of the barrel, the half of the grip that isn’t deformed, and redirects all his mental capacity into rebuilding the original cavities. It’s the same sort of precarious game as trying to suss out Bond – learning the maps of his scars and moles and where they overlap, figuring out his morning coffee, and the exact force he likes to have his hair pulled with. It’s been months and he almost has the trigger reconstructed.

 

**(xi)**

It’s bound to come out eventually, the scenario always an accident when it crosses Q’s mind, because having supernatural abilities never truly makes for good dinner table conversation despite the fact that in their line of work ballistics tests and the inner machinations of the Italian government do.

The downfall ends up being a bus crashing through a storefront in Ankara, Q setting his tea mug down badly as he watches the security footage. It’s 004’s mission, though the bus has nothing to do with it. The wreck of it is enigmatic even on the tape, in spite of that, none of them quite able to look away, and that’s how his hand is two inches too far from the desk. The mug tips over the edge and spills on its way down.

Q doesn’t even know he’s holding it half a foot above the ground until he meets Bond line of sight, flicking between Q and the suspended mug. It falls – like the vase – and shatters.

“Oh shit,” he breathes, not for the mug but for himself.

The implication of what has transpired is too much to bear and Q is on the floor picking shards out of a puddle before he can think things through. He’s got tea soaking into his shoes, splattered down the length of his trouser leg too. Somehow, Bond is right there with him, half kneeling beside the bin.

“How clumsy,” Q says over the horrible stumble his heart makes when their fingers brush.

All Bond says in return is: “Happens to the best of us.”

His eyes flick up to meet Q’s, perfectly calm, and Q is certain something breaks in him at that precise moment. Or maybe something reforms, because you can’t always tell with these things. He swallows around the raw panic dissolving in his chest and doesn’t put a name to the feeling slowly replacing it. It’s warm and suffocating and he refuses to call it love.

 

**(xii)**

The limits to what he can do wend and wind over time. The vase half formed shatters the rest of the way when he is five. At twenty-four, the mess he finds one night on the kitchen floor is easily fixed, the guilty swish of a cat’s tail the only evidence anything was ever amiss.

He starts a notebook on ‘the reformative arts’ after his first visit to the library and leaves a completed copy of it there four years later, simply signed _Henry_ . He’s thirty-one when he posts the second and the handwriting is the same, though there’s a small _Q_ at the end this time.

It takes the better part of two years, but he reforms Bond’s old gun and outfits it with new features before he lets him break it again. _They have time_ , he thinks when he gets the scraps back, _all the time in the world fix what they keep on breaking._

 

**(xiii)**

There is something befittingly delirious about the mornings born from unslept nights, a day put together from the scraps of the previous one. Q cradles a mug of Earl Grey under his purpling eyes and lets himself lean against the kitchen counter with closed eyes as he listens to Bond stirring in another room. He’s such a graceless sleeper, it leaves Q tender for that faintest hint of a snore and the way he blinks one eye open first, then the other, and finally both.

“Good morning,” Bond growls from the doorway, and Q snaps his eyes open thinking of how his blond hair always seems a shade dirtier at dawn. “Have you slept at all?”

“If I did, it wasn’t intentionally.”

It’s too early for Bond’s defences to run on autopilot, so he cracks a jaded smile and makes for Q’s pot of lethally caffeinated tea. On the other counter, the toast pops and Q moves to snatch his breakfast out of the toaster while Bond raids the fridge for their leftover dinner.

They regroup in the living room, pinned by a ray of sunshine and a _meowr_ from the direction of the sofa. Bond kneads his hand into the the fur at the back of Nero’s skull, just as the cat likes it best, and Q does him the favour of fetching the fork he forgot. It’s a little revolting in its domesticity, but Q is happy to let someone else acquiesce to his cat’s demands and tuck his icicle feet into Bond’s lap.

“Mmh, I almost forgot,” Bond says, swallowing a mouthful of chicken kurma, before he continues, “I brought you something back from Greece. It’s over there on the table.” At Q’s raised eyebrow, he clarifies, “In the bag.”

“All right.”

It’s too obvious an invitation to defer, so Q abandons his toast and toes over to the table where Bond left his belongings the previous night, coat slung over a chair and his suitcase pushed under the table. Of course Q had taken note of the plastic bag left on the table, but they’re in the habit of telling and not asking, so he’d left it there untouched.

Now, he fishes out the wooden box without a word and slides the lid off. “Shards?” he asks and it’s so incredulous a notion, he laughs.

“I was told – well, yelled at – that it’s an antiquity, when I broke it.”

“Naturally. You really are incurable.”

“Do you think it’s real?”

Q bites his lip and traces a finger over planes of carved red clay. “It feels old, at least,” he says, “I’d have to know what it is in order to make a more accurate judgement.”

Except that not knowing is half the fun. With pieces like this, when he doesn’t know what they used to be part of, there is no distorted whole to comprehend, just fractures upon fractures with complementary serrations.

“Perhaps you ought to reassemble it then.”

“Reform,” Q corrects, and Bond doesn’t ask, merely twists on the sofa to continue petting the cat. It’s going to take him all weekend to puzzle this one out, but they’re hardly in a rush, ever.

Bond still has the puckered ridges of two scarred bullet holes in his flank that will take years to settle and smooth out, a fresh cut healing under the bandage on his left arm. And then, when those have faded, he’ll have new wounds, new shrapnel, new nightmares diffusing out of him in the comfort of Q’s sheets.

None of those are cracks Q can fix, but he’ll be around to mend the guns and the cars and the bleak mornings, to twist his fingers around Bond’s when the shadows are too heavy to bear, because the man who breaks and reforms himself simply has to be his.

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **1.** The title is loosely inspired by the first part of T. S. Eliot's _Choruses From 'The Rock'_  
>  **2.** Q is named Henry in honour of one of my favourite fic called [The Long Haul](http://archiveofourown.org/works/733810) by apiphile, which I highly recommend to anyone willing to dabble in a Tanner/Q fic.  
>  **3.** Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi (i.e. golden joinery) is a traditional Japanese art form by which broken ceramics are mended with gold. The idea is to turn the flaw of the fracture into an integral part of the repaired dish and make it more valuable for having been broken.  
>  **4.** The magic in this is vaguely based on the kind displayed by the main characters of Erin Morgenstern’s _The Night Circus_ as young children.
> 
> Thank you so much to my artist and the Nut for organising this year's 00Q Reverse Bang. You should definitely check out the other works in the collection.
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](http://obfuscatress.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/Shippress) :)


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